Exhibition shows off ancient Afghan works

Pamela Constable, Washington Post

Published
4:00 am PST, Saturday, December 22, 2007

They survived the collapse of civilizations and crossed the known world on camelback. Some lay buried for centuries in an Afghan nomad's sepulcher. Others were spirited out of a museum in modern-day Kabul under siege from looters and religious fanatics, then hidden in secret vaults under the presidential palace.

Now, a selection of Afghanistan's ancient artistic treasures - from a dagger hilt carved with a Siberian bear to Greek coins from an excavated city - is scheduled to come to Washington in May and continue on a 17-month national tour, according to the National Geographic Society and the National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition, which will be on display in Washington for nearly four months before traveling to New York, San Francisco and Houston, aims to provide a glimpse of the creative melting pot that Afghanistan once represented - centuries before it became known as a grim Cold War battlefield and a victim of Islamic repression under the Taliban.

"We hope this exhibit will help overcome the darkness of Afghanistan's recent history and shed some light on its rich past, thousands of years old, as a crossroads of cultures and civilizations," said Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador in Washington.

As a trove of history, the artifacts are as edifying as they are beautiful. Selected from four sites, they span 3,000 years, beginning circa 2500 B.C. (during the Bronze Age), and include scripts and images from a dozen cultures as far-flung as India, China and Rome.

The National Museum in Kabul, from which many of the artifacts come, endured rocket attacks during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, idol-smashing under the radical Islamic Taliban regime in the spring of 2001 and a final bout of looting during the chaos of the U.S.-led assault that toppled the Taliban the same winter.